Various digital mobile phone standards are currently deployed worldwide. These standards include, for example, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS) in Europe and (Code-Division Multiple Access) CDMA in the United States. Due to the increasing demand for mobile telephone services, many of these standards are deployed together. In addition, further deployments of new standards are currently underway or will be in the foreseeable future. For example, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard and the IEEE 802.16 (WiMax) standard are currently being deployed.
In the transition from the currently deployed standards (second generation) to the third or fourth generation standards, both second and third generation standards currently coexist and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Thus, multi-frequency band systems, that include two or more frequency bands belonging to two or more communication standards will continue to coexist in parallel and will work together to provide coverage and services to the wireless communications devices.
Many new frequency bands have been deployed for use and operators are requesting increased roaming capability. Roaming is a general term referring to the extension of connectivity service in a location that is different from a home location where the service was registered. Roaming typical increases the likelihood that the wireless communications device is connected to the network, without losing the connection. Thus, there is now a demand for wireless communications devices to support more than one frequency band. For example, legacy GSM/Enhanced Data GSM Environment (EDGE) may be required on overlapping Wideband Code-Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) frequency bands, such as GSM850/WCDMA B5 and GSM900/WCDMA B8.
Furthermore, before being deployed these wireless communications devices are required to undergo rigorous testing to ensure that a desired quality of service is provided to users of the wireless communications devices. Some of these tests are over the air (OTA) performance tests, which are commonly performed with head and/or hand phantoms, i.e. models of the human hand and/or head configured to hold the wireless communications device during performance testing. Since the position of the wireless communications device in the hand of the user and/or against the head of the user changes the performance of the wireless communications device, for example, antenna performance, use of these head and hand phantoms may allow performance testing to better simulate real world conditions.